Boot issues

Ok I got one for you guys, see if anyone knows what's going on. Sometimes when I start my computer, I get my background but no icons, start button, tool bar etc. Shut it off, turn it back on, sometimes as many as 5 times, the I get normal operation. Virus software shows nothing, I'm at a loss. Thinking format and restore, but I have tons of pictures, mp3's, things like that. Any ideas?

I'm not sure about the source of your problem it could be many things and troubleshooting remotly isn't practical for this problem, I would try ad-aware, but instead of rebooting to fix the problem do this.

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del

When the task manager opens up make sure you are under the applications tab.

Click new task type in explorer.exe and press ok

Maybe a driver is crashing before loading all the rest of Windows?

Backup all of your personal data and do a format.

When I try the crtl-alt-del, nothing comes up, I think explorer has not loaded correctly, and windows is soooo dependent on that particular piece of junk. Yup, I hate explorer. Oz, I'm leaning towards that, just too lazy to do it, but its probably going to happen by the end of this week, should only take about 5 hours or so :disappoin

You can try starting in safe mode and disabling any devices you suspect might be causing problems, but it's pretty much hit/miss doing it that way. If Windows starts consistently after you have disabled a certain device then you should re-install the driver for that device...

Or you can try a system restore....

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q306084

But as advised earlier backup your personal data.

skibum - 5 hours?

No.

Backup all personal data (cookies, email, favourites, documents, music, spreadsheets, pictures etc).

Make sure you have drivers for all your hardware.

Make sure you have all your software.

Reinstall Windows, and all software. Then copy your data back. Should be about 2-3 hours max.

200gb hard drive, its about 70% full... It's gonna be a loooong day. In addition to the pictures, music, things like that, there's also photo editing software, desktop publishing, ms office, mapping software, among others. The stack of cd's sitting on my desk right now for all this is about 14 inches tall, and the boxes are slim ones.

Pay some other monkey to do it. AND MAKE SURE YOU IMAGE IT WHEN YOU'RE DONE! Best of luck matey.

Thanks. I'm planning on a second hard drive, easier to store that than the stack of cd's. I can even leave it in the box, just unplug it and use it to redo all this crap again if I hit another problem.

skibum - once you have all the info you'll need on your new drive, you can buy a cheap external case for it for $20 or so. Then take it anywhere ;)